Lard a round of beef with slices of bacon and put in a large saucepan. Cover and let brown a few minutes. Add sliced onion and boiling water to cover. Let cook slowly until tender; then scrape 6 carrots and cut thin; add 2 sliced onions, 2 cloves of garlic and let cook until tender. Thicken with butter and flour. Season highly with salt, pepper and parsley; add to the meat, and let all cook together a half hour and serve hot.
This is a stovetop braise in the bœuf à la mode mould, written in the telegraphic style of a daily calendar cookbook. The instructions assume you know how long a round of beef takes; they are otherwise sound.
- The hinge: brown properly before the water goes in"Cover and let brown a few minutes" understates it. Brown the larded round uncovered, on all sides, in the bare saucepan until the surface is genuinely dark, then add the onion and liquid. A covered pan steams rather than browns, and the finished gravy will be pale and thin without that crust.
- LardingIn strict usage, to lard means to thread strips of fat through the interior of the meat with a larding needle; period books sometimes used the word loosely for laying slices over the joint. A round is lean enough that actually inserting the fat matters. If you have no needle, cut deep slits with a thin knife and push in batons of bacon or salt pork.
- A round of beefThe original does not say what size; a whole or partial round is meant. Bottom round or rump gives the best result; top round is leaner and can go dry. Figure on 6 to 8 servings from a 4 lb piece.
- Cooking time"Until tender" is 2 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer for a 4 lb round, turning it once or twice. The surface of the liquid should barely tremble; a hard boil tightens the muscle fibres and squeezes out juice.
- Boiling water to coverAdding boiling rather than cold water keeps the pot from dropping out of a simmer. Half-covering the meat is enough and concentrates the sauce; full immersion makes soup you will then have to reduce.
- Thicken with butter and flourMost likely a beurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, about 2 tablespoons of each for a quart of liquid, whisked into the simmering broth in small lumps; a cooked roux would answer as well. Let it cook two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- The vegetablesThe carrots and second batch of onions are cooked separately in some of the broth, thickened, seasoned, and then returned to the meat. Sliced thin, they need 15 to 20 minutes. Two cloves of garlic for this quantity is mild by modern taste; three or four is defensible.
- "Season highly"Season the sauce, not just the meat, and do it after thickening and after the final half hour together. Braising liquid reduces, and salt added early can end up sharp. The parsley is better added at the very end than boiled for thirty minutes.
Larding a lean round with bacon, browning it in its own fat, then stewing it slowly with onions, carrots and garlic is the domestic French pot roast that cookbooks of the period filed under bœuf à la mode or, in the south, daube — the point of the larding being that round of beef has almost no internal fat to keep it from drying through several hours of cooking. Books like this one, arranged as a dish a day with a nationality attached, compressed each foreign dish to the few lines that would fit a calendar page. The compression is why the recipe never says how long "until tender" is, though it does find room for the finishing step — cooking meat and thickened vegetables together for a final half hour so the flavours marry.